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What do Bing and Yahoo look for in a site?

Do Bing and Yahoo look for authoritative sites like google does? Do they punish sites for black hat or spamming?

The reason I ask these questions is because one of my competitors was ranking in first place for many great keywords in Google, they have the highest authority out of all of their competitors. They must have been punished by Google because now they are not ranking for any great keywords in Google. However they are ranking 1st in Bing and Yahoo for most the top keywords, getting the the most visibility out of all the sites.

I attached a small Graph with latest visibility for the sites with the top keywords from google and then I also included the company that was punished from google they are the green circles on the graph.

7 Responses

Well, to begin, Yahoo search is now run off the Bing algorithm (algo). So while there may still be a "Yahoo Slurp" crawler out there, it's based on a different algo than once before. Bing now completely runs Yahoo search.

Search engines have their own algorithms. There is no specific algo that they all must adhere to. So while rankings for your site might go up in one engine, they might very well go down in another (or not move at all).

And I can assume Bing watches for black-hat SEO tactics, although I don't have any physical data to back that up. But it's safe to say they do.

Huge mistake website owners make is to optimize their sites for Google only. Google only makes up 65% (?) of the search market, so by optimizing for Google, and Google alone, you're cutting off a potential 35% of traffic.

There is a ton of forums, documentation, webmaster tools for Bing, just as there is Google, so you need to put in that extra effort to see what makes a site rank well in Bing.

As long as you stick to the fundamentals, ie. proper internal link structure, attain solid/safe, relevant backlinks to your site, use your Webmaster tools (and SEOmoz ;)) to make sure site errors and such are taken care of, and get your HTML error free with proper H1-H6 tags (where applicable)/title tags, meta tags, etc., then, and only then, should you start tweaking your site for direct optimization for each engine.

From what I have read and my own experiences, Bing is lot more fussy on what they index, its lot harder to get in the index, I have found that Bing also likes clean code free from all violations. your site needs to be able to be crawled easily.Bing is also quick to lose trust if you misuse things such as redirects, canonicals and sitemaps. Duane Forrester told me in regard to sitemaps that they will lose trust in your site map if your lastmod dates are not accurate, if you have any 404’s in it; they only want 200 status pages. You not only should have a sitemap. You should keep it up to date they have no intention of indexing everything that Google does.

I have also got sites to well in Bing with no or few links, for pretty good keywords, so i dont think they rely on links so much.

A large difference I've noticed with Bing vs Google in the years has been that Google is more inclined to index and place a site within the SERP's much quicker, basically giving a new site 'the benefit of the doubt'; however, that site must maintain a good standing throughout the course of the 'sandbox' period to ensure they don't drop off the map after a year or two.

Bing seems to show preference towards domains that are aged. Their search index, at least at one point; I'm sure they're working to update, or might have even done so already, doesn't seem to be as fresh as Google's, which has its advantages as well.

With Google, you'll often find many new sites at the top of the SERP's for any given search on a non-highly-competitive search term. Just Google's way of getting more information to the masses whether it's a scraped site of not (unfortunately, I'm still finding scraped sites in the index). Where Bing seems to have sites that are tried and true.

Just my observations over the years. However, it's been a while since I've really paid a whole lot of attention to this.

The huge weight placed by Bing on user interaction with the search results as a ranking factor. This was amazing stuff. Basically, Bing is willing to test any page by indexing it. In fact you can pretty much directly inject any URL you want into their search results using the Submit URL feature of Bing Webmaster Tools. Then they will test it, and if the click interaction data is bad, out (or down) you go.

The ranking of the priorities for publishers in Duane’s eyes. #1 Content #2 Social Media #3 Links. Links were rated as the third most important area. Third.

The article is very easy to read, with the highlights put in front. This is recent information from a couple of months ago.

I think TEST is the keyword when Duane is talking about the index. Further down the page it makes it quite clear they will kick it back out again its no good.

“If the users love it, it stays. If the users don’t like it, it gets dropped. This is a way to determine if the users feel this was a quality result.”

Duane has said many times that they will not be indexing everything; they only want your best pages.

"Rand: Right, yeah. I was going to say, and Bing has been pretty good about penalizing a lot of the links that look manipulative on the Web too.

Duane: Yeah. It's a natural part of keeping things clean, right? At Bing, we are very keen on having a quality driven index. So, the main focus we have is making sure that everything that gets in is a good resource, when someone makes a query they get a realistic answer that is actually an answer to their query. Not, here's some shallow depth data. I'm going to click on it, and then oh, it's not really what I want. I go back and I try it again. We're trying to shorten that number of searches to get to the final answer."

Duane: Right, exactly. I love this idea, Rand, this whole pick your top 200, whatever the number happens to be for you, pick it and run with it. You don't need everything indexed. Pick your best stuff and make sure that's in there. Make sure your quality content is in there, right? Be sure that you look at the site and say, "What's the goal of this page? Is it to monetize ads? Is it to convert somehow? What is the goal of it? Is it optimized properly to do that? If it is, I want that indexed in the search engine ranking well."http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds

That’s good news about the Social media, because every thing I build seems to rank high in Bing, with no social media. I guess that’s something I can fall back on, if rankings start to slip.

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